*BG*
Well, there is a lot of documentation on ole automation. In the Knowledge Base and here in the newsgroups. What I found was that there was a big difference between seemingly similar goals. Specifically, if you want to open an instance of word, stuff it with info, print it, then close it...That's fairly common, it seems to me. And easier to get going (because people here have a lot of experience with it). If you want to mix word in to your app as a user tool...that was more complicated to untangle.

One of the biggest issues is (for me), getting the users up and running with a Word doc, and then not getting into a situation where Word was closed, but my app still had a reference to it that caused an "RPC Server not found" error.
On top of that, Office '97 Word uses VBA instead of WordBasic. Sorta. There are some Word VBA commands that won't fly in VFP, so, low and behold, the work around is to use WordBasic, which, it turns out is still accessible in the application object. Unfortunately, I haven't found a centralized list of which commands work and which don't.

All that said, it's been worth it. While I'm still dancing around it all rather gingerly, I'd be happy to share what I've learned, and am still learning.

Golly, maybe I couldn't even write it up, eh? *g*

>Nancy,
>
>Having used Foxfire, R&R, and Crystal for both canned and end-user customized reports; I had never thought of using Word. Is there a "whitepaper" or tutorial available? (to be honest the most I've ever used Word for is wordprocessing)
>
>TIA
>
>Don Burton